Art, photography, and scientific literature record long standing interest in how humans or animals run, and details of what happens in a collision. Various systems for sensing, collecting, storing, and communicating data about moving systems and remote locations have been described in the literature.
For example, in virtual reality systems the motion of the head and other extremities is continuously monitored to provide feedback to the computer to enable updating of images, as mentioned in U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,972 to Stewart et al (the “'972 patent”). The '972 patent also notes that systems have been developed for military applications to monitor the orientation of a pilot's head to assist in targeting. For these applications the helmets must remain hardwired to support infrastructure.
One system for measuring and recording acceleration of a person's head in a sports helmet that does not require hard wiring to extensive support infrastructure is described in the '972 patent. The system provides accelerometers in the helmet for sensing impacts. The accelerometers communicate with memory for recording in real time data from the accelerometers. The memory can be in the helmet itself or data can be transmitted from the helmet to a nearby receiver for storage there, for example, on a computer hard drive. Either way, the data collected from the accelerometers can be analyzed to detect the precise motions of the head which precede a severe head injury.
A weather station described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,738 to Brown, describes a scheme for collecting weather data from a remote location. The station has two separable sections. A sensor section measures and records weather related information, such as local temperature, pressure, humidity, ambient light, and ambient static charge, for periodic transmission to a receiver section. The receiver section can also communicate with global weather reporting systems.
Other systems, such as the black box on an aircraft, store data from sensors on a recording device having limited storage capacity. Stored data is periodically overwritten and only the data for a specified time period leading up to an event, such as a crash, is available after the event. The black box must then be found so the data stored can be retrieved.
Other systems transmit external data in real time into a live subject, for example, to stimulate human organs, such as heart or ear, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,532,930. Others transmit energy under the skin, for example, for recharging an implanted battery, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,474 to Schulman et al. These systems do not generally sense, collect, and store data though.
All the systems that sense and collect data, store the data, and then communicate the data have inefficiencies either in the data acquisition or in the transmission of the data. Thus, a better system for acquiring and transmitting data is needed, and this solution is provided by the following description.